SEE Museum, Manchester NH

December 15, 2011

Miaka's take:
Today, our plan was to visit the SEE Museum (SEE stands for Science Enrichment Encounters) in the Millyard. Getting there was a little interesting as the streets are a touch confusing. A one-way street and a missed turn had us looping around, after we'd already realized that you can't get to the upper parking lot from within the lower parking lot. (The Millyard being built on a hill, there are entrances on both the first and second floor of some of the buildings, especially those on that side of the street. Commercial St is at one level and Bedford Rd, the next street up, is about a story above it. Yes, it's a bit of a steep hill. Most if not all of the buildings in the area date back to at least the 1800s.) We got there eventually, though. Proceeding into the building, we took the elevator up to the 4th floor (yes, I know, you're supposed to use the stairs 'cause it's good exercise and all, but I threw out my back earlier this year and it was acting up).
Once we were in, coats off and admission ($8 a person, so $16 for the two of us) paid, the fun began!
There are two floors to the SEE museum. We started out on the upper floor, where the front door was. I think we sort of breezed through most of the upper floor over the course of about half an hour or so, though we spent more time in the 'Seasons of Change' exhibit. Lots of cool and interesting stuff about how our actions now will affect the environment, and the changes we could see by 2075. There were a few notes also about changes we can already see happening, like the rising temperature of the ocean waters off the coasts of New England, which threaten the lobster population, and the decline of ground-freezing in the winter, which affects the flow of sap in the sugar maples, reducing the amount of maple syrup New England can produce.
Most of the other things on the top floor didn't really seem to catch King's eye, so we headed down the stairs to check out the lower floor. Here, we found a few more things to play with, though one large section of the floor was taken up with a non-interactive exhibit: a full historical model of the Millyard built entirely of Legos. 3 million Legos. That must've taken forever to build, but it was really cool! There was water to represent the canals and the river, there were train tracks everywhere, and horses pulling carts and carriages, people working or playing, a parade going down Elm St... VERY elaborate. There were also a few more buildings that exist in different parts of the city lined up against a different wall. I found it very cool to see that one of the buildings modeled was the administration building for the first college I went to (Notre Dame College, which closed in 2002).
King, however, wasn't particularly interested in the Legos, since he couldn't interact with them. We played with a couple musical displays, then wandered along, finding some displays about electricity. These didn't hold our attention for all that long, though, and we wandered away, finding a robotic arm to play with (and gaining a whole new level of respect for the kids that operate the FIRST robots! Attempting to get the arm to pick something up was tough!). After that we passed through a set of hanging blue-and-clear plastic into a mock-up of a submarine...where I quickly discovered that I would not be able to get a good look through the periscope, because I was too tall. Exiting the submarine, we turned a corner through another set of hanging plastic 'water' and found ourselves in a section focused on optical illusions! King was temporarily entranced by a computer which displayed several common optical illusions, while I went a little ways ahead to look in another room, which was labeled as containing more optical illusions. There was a label warning of strobe lights, though, so I decided we'd better skip that room--King doesn't handle strobe lights all that well, I remembered.
We played with a number of optical illusions as we wandered through the exhibit. One of them involved a neon light (a straight bar) that spun when turned on, and allowed you to control a number of variables--pulse frequency, spin speed, and voltage. We messed with that one for a couple minutes, then I managed to do something that made my head hurt, so I decided that was enough and we moved on to another exhibit.
We worked our way through a number of fun things, a fair amount of which spun in some fashion, including a display of gears held to a 'wall' by magnets, which didn't seem to entertain King as much as it did me. Of course, my attempts at lining up the gears to turn lots of them kept disconnecting. While I was attempting to get the gears going, King found a seat--chairs that were connected to a pulley system--the idea being that you pull yourself up! This looked like fun, so I took a seat in the other chair and gave the rope a tug--woah, it's harder than I thought! King couldn't get his chair to move on his own (you'd have to be able to lift 1/7th of your weight to pull up the chair he was sitting in, and 1/7th of and adult'sequivalent to about 6 bags of flour). King appeared to be impressed by this, and we swapped chairs. I pulled the new chair up to the top as well, watching him tug ineffectually on the rope and laugh. Then I let myself down and hopped up to try pulling his chair while he sat there. Again, rather easier said than done. I had to pull while walking away and use my foot to hold the rope down while I adjusted my grip. I took him about three-quarters of the way up, and then he decided that was too high (to be fair, the chairs did not have any kind of belt mechanism, so he was probably nervous about the possibility of falling out). Letting him down was almost as difficult as getting him up, since I really didn't want to just drop him. I managed, though, and we wandered off to explore the next exhibit and give my hands a rest.
Once we'd made our way through all the exhibits on the lower floor, including hitting the bathrooms, we headed back upstairs. Wandering back through the submarine mock-up, I caught sight of something I'd missed the first time through--a 'holograph' image of a shark in one of the portholes! I jumped, startled by all the teeth, and King got a good laugh out of it with me. We stopped at the bottom of the stairs to play with a small exhibit on air currents for a moment before clanking our way back up the metal staircase.
On the entry floor again, we wandered through more of the exhibits, ducked under a wooden wall into a giant kaleidoscope, and explored. There was a section with several brain-teaser type puzzles, though this was apparently more interesting to me than to King. We'd hit all the exhibits except those behind a fence which looked like they were specially geared for younger kids (say about 5 years old or younger), so we decided to take a quick walk through the gift shop, just to see if anything caught our eye. King wanted to get some Oreos, so I asked if he was hungry. His reply boiled down to "No, but I am thirsty," so we hit up a nearby vending machine for a Coke, which we ended up splitting. He got a straw and drank his fill, and then I finished the can since it was a can and we couldn't really carry it around.
After refreshing ourselves, we went back to the exhibit on weather ('Seasons of Change') and poked around for a while. King sat down to play with a computer running a display called 'Boston Underwater' about the changing levels of the water in Boston Harbour and around the city, especially during storms, and I went to the big table to fiddle with 'environmental effects' and see if I could make it tell a kinder story about 2075. I got frustrated a few minutes later when the table seemed to be having trouble accepting my inputs, so I went back to King and discovered that the computer he'd been playing with apparently had a problem. It was giving him an error message, which was frustrating because there was nothing at all which we could do about it with the buttons available.
"I'm sorry," I told him, "I guess it's busted. Shall we go look at something else?"
"Yeah. Why's it busted?"
"I dunno."
"It said I should reload the link." Except there was nothing we could click the link with to reload it, so we went to look at the rest of the exhibit.
After some more time spent exploring the 'Seasons of Change' area, we decided that we'd pretty much done everything we wanted to at the museum and dinner sounded like a good idea, even if it was a bit early. On that note, we called up my husband to ask him to drive us to Jillian's (mostly because I wasn't sure walking would be a good idea with my back acting up and the rain threatening).
While we waited for our ride, we started brainstorming ideas for what we could do next week, coming up with a decent list. Once we got dropped off at Jillian's, we crafted the part of this entry that his King's take on the day, then decided on our top three ideas for next week.
Dinner was delicious, and desert was even better--we got the 'Killer Chocolate Cake', which turned out to be a wonderfully chocolaty creation, two layers of melt-in-your-mouth fudge with a smaller layer of cake in between. It was so deliciously rich that even splitting the one piece we couldn't finish it, but it was so good!
After dinner, Dad picked us up and we went our separate ways home, looking forward to next week's adventure!


King's take:
King liked playing with the robotic arm and the pulleys, but the pulleys were too high.
We went to the SEE museum.
Today was great because we went to the SEE museum. We went to a computer that had flood warnings but it stopped working. It wanted us to reload the link.
We went up the elevator. We paid $20 for admission and we got change back.
We went downstairs. There were Legos downstairs. There were a LOT of Legos! They were built into a college and a lot of other things, like city hall.
We saw a computer that had changing illusions on it. I thought illusions were only mirages! The computer changed different illusions.
We saw some gears and pulleys, a robotic arm. We did see some turtle cages, but they weren't downstairs.
We went back upstairs.
We went to the gift shop and I looked at some Oreos.
I went to the vending machine to get $1 for a Coke. I put a dollar into the vending machine to get a Coke. We asked for a straw because I couldn't drink the Coke without a straw.
We watched something about lobsters and about maple syrup and something about Boston underwater. The Boston underwater computer had a problem. We decided to do something else.
We called Archi to take us to Jillian's.
The car had a mess. You should clean it up sometime. (Miaka note: I have been telling my husband all summer that the car needs to get cleaned out, but it hasn't happened, and at this point probably won't until it starts to get warm again.)
We talked about what we should do next week.
Miaka got startled by a picture of a shark.
We got pizza and Philly Cheesesteak at Jillian's.
We're going to have Killer Chocolate Cake after our dinner is done.
I am going to box up my pizza and save it for lunch tomorrow.
We had a good time today.